“You’re not hearing me, honey,” the first voice said. “You got bupkes. And I pay bupkes for bupkes.”
The second voice sighed. “Save the Yiddish act, Miles. You’re Episcopalian. You’re not interested, fine. Kick it loose and I’ll shop it to a real pub.”
“Pay me back my advance and you can shop it wherever the hell you want. I paid for Donna Fairchild, not a bunch of burned-out ex-cons.”
There was a long pause, each one waiting the other out. “What’s wrong with you?” the second voice said finally. “This used to be the kind of story you got a woody over. It’s got murder, rape, celebrity, not to mention this guy Josh’s Robin Hood act. The only difference between this and one of those Dominick Dunne stories you love so much is it isn’t some European royal family or some fashion mogul. It’s real people.”
“People that the public has never heard of and could give a shit about.”
“They’ll care when they’re done reading about them. And you’ll either be the guy who found them or the one who passed on them.”
“I don’t get it. What’s so fascinating about these guys? Other than they’re ex-cons?”
“First off, they’re as far from ex-cons, personality-wise, as you can get. Put it this way: we’re in the airport waiting for our plane, doing some people watching. These guys are the last group we’d pick as cons.”
“Which just makes us marks, right?”
“Okay, point taken. But look at it through your reader’s eyes. You got William. A professor in for anti-government activities. Soft voice, nicest guy in the world. And Lucky. Looks like Tom Sawyer—you’re expecting the straw between his teeth—though from what I gather, he doesn’t have an honest bone in his body. And last, there’s Clark, who no one—even the other guys up at the camp—has ever heard say a word. He killed a man, but somehow everyone up on that mountain trusts him with everything from their houses to their kids.”
“I’m not hearing anything about their leader, the guy you say the story hinges on. Why’s that?”
“Josh. Because he won’t say word one to me. And no one else will, either. I’ve tried every angle—his links to Donna Fairchild, his role in the Vasquez murder, why the cops talk to him about every rape in the area. Nothing. Then I try the positive route—his Robin Hood activities, both with that camp and for the mountain community in general. Nothing. And not ‘nothing’, like there’s nothing there. ‘Nothing’, like, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll look elsewhere. Or move on.”
There was a long pause. “One more week,” Miles said in a tired voice. “And, Carol—if you can’t tie this Josh to Fairchild more than you’ve got, either develop the rape angle or come home.”
William reached over and turned off the tape recorder, then looked up at Lucky, Clark and The Gimp. “So much for our subtle attempts at dissuasion.”
“How’d you get that, anyway?” The Gimp nodded at the tape recorder.
“I saw Sammy the Ear last Saturday on Visitors Day,” Lucky said. “He put me on to a local who used to handle some of his business in this area.”
“So how much does she know?” The Gimp asked.
“It’s not what she knows,” William said. “It’s what she suspects.”
“She won’t get anything from the prison. The cons are loyal to Josh and the officials are too embarrassed to talk.”
“Don’t be so sure. She’s a dog with a bone.” William nodded at the tape recorder. “I don’t like where this is heading.”
Six days later, the four men gathered in the bar’s billiards room after lunch. Lucky took the tape recorder out of his backpack and placed it on the table. Clark extracted the knife from the sheath on his boot and extracted a small block of wood from his coat pocket. He began to carve as Lucky punched the button and the voices drifted from the machine.
Carol was summarizing her story for Eagleton, the magazine’s legal counsel. Her editor, Miles, was also on the phone. She started with the one-paragraph clip from June 1971 noting that Joshua Clements had joined the San Tomas prison staff in the new position of Director of Prisoner Relations. That before moving to San Tomas, Clements had pioneered and administered the award-winning work release program at Alameda County Jail.
“I looked into that,” Carol said. “Great results, but county’s minor league. The state wanted to see if he could get the same results with the hard cases.”
“There’s nothing there that worries me,” said the deeper voice. “Now, the rapes, that’s a different story. You need to be buttoned up there.”
“Most of it’s public record. I mean, the guy essentially made rape into a cottage industry. Where do you think he got the money to buy that camp and half the mountain?”
“We’ll need to contact at least some of the women. See if his role was what they said it was.”
“I did that already. How he got them to trust him, that could be a story in itself.”
There was the sound of shuffled papers. “Okay, let’s go over the Fairchild angle one last time.”
There was the strike of a match and then the fiery intake. “Vasquez is assigned to the prison November of ’71. He’s killed in May of ’72. Records show that Fairchild visited him six times in that period. Two of those meetings were preceded by meetings with Josh Clements.”
“That tracks. But Clements wasn’t working the night that Vasquez died.”
“He wasn’t on duty. Whether he was there or not, I’m still looking into that.”
“And after Vasquez was murdered, she visited the prison eight times as part of her investigation. Clements was on her list of scheduled interviews all eight times.”
William turned off the tape recorder, then fast-forwarded it. As the tape whirred, he said, “She goes on about the trial for a bit, but we all know how that ended up.” He looked down at the whirling numbers, then jabbed the button. “And then there’s this.”
“Yesterday I’m doing standard backtrack. I talked to a personnel clerk at the Alameda County prison, and she confirmed that Clements had worked there for two and a half years, the first as part of his UC Berkeley graduate program. So I contact Berkeley, said Josh was applying for a job and I needed his transcripts. They said fine, they’d send me grades and faculty notations for his graduate work. But—and this is where it gets interesting—when I ask for his previous academic records, the ones before Berkeley, I get transferred to a supervisor. He stonewalls me with procedural bullshit for over two minutes, talking about a lack of ‘educational reciprocity’ with the other institution, crap like that. It probably wouldn’t have raised any flags if they hadn’t transferred me so quickly. So I hung up and called Stu.”
“Stu in research?” Miles asked.
“Uh-huh. It took him less than ten minutes to crack the UC system. Said it was one of the easier ones out there…”
“And…”
“And he told me that Josh Clements had a Federal clamp on his file.”
“Meaning what?”
“You want to take that one, Eagleton?” Carol asked.
“It means there is a Federal lock on his file. You see it for Witness Protection, for certain agency activity, both FBI and CIA. Whichever one you choose, it means your Mr. Clements has a history that someone wants to hide. And that, unless you’re eager to be prosecuted in Federal court, you let it stay hidden.”
William turned the tape recorder off. “They’re funding her for another month. She’s supposed to check in every week.”
“What’s all that stuff about the Feds?” The Gimp asked.
Lucky and Clark looked at William, who raised his hands. “Look, just because Josh and I play chess and talk doesn’t make me his confessor. Our conversations are always about politics or literature, never personal.”
He looked at Clark, whose hands were carving but whose eyes were on the tape recorder. “What do you think that clamp has to do with, Clark?”
Clark pulled out his pad of paper from his overall pocket and wrote a single word. William looked at it and nodded. “I agree.”
The Gimp looked down at the paper. “What’s Baltimore?”
William shrugged. “I don’t know. I just know it isn’t good.”